I mean obviously Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid’s Tale if you liked BNW and 1984!

Personally I enjoyed a lot of HG Wells’ work for similar reasons — War of The Worlds, for example, is an obvious allegory for colonialism, (with the aliens as the empire builders). The original book is excellent. I binged a tonne of his works, including the Time Machine, the invisible man, the sleeper wakes and the island of dr Moreau. They’re quite short books. Easily read in a day (though I am a fast reader).

Otherwise I quite enjoyed for whom the bell tolls (Hemingway; set during the Spanish civil war, in which he fought, as well as Orwell funnily enough).

Marigold is a flower — e.g. marsh marigolds :)

Yeah — on the rare occasion that I have a night out, when I get home I drink more water than I need to not feel thirsty (about two glasses). Alcohol makes you dehydrated and when you wake up in the morning that makes a hangover massively worse.

Personally I find hangovers worse than the enjoyment of getting drunk, so typically won’t have more than 2/3 drinks anyway \o/

Stilton and port. Woof.

I think this is quite a pessimistic view of what a school system could/should provide. The learning environment isn’t just what is taught in a classroom (though this should of course be a decent curriculum), but the comprehensive system should ‘force’ socialisation with people whose backgrounds don’t match your own.

The danger — to my mind — of losing a school system, is that you end up with an increasingly stratified society, where there is no reason for mixing between groups, and there is at once no mechanism for social mobility, and no driver for the development of empathy for ‘out’ groups.

I’m talking from a UK perspective and would say our school system is FAR from perfect, but I’m also very wary of home schooling etc., as I’d argue that would drive inequality in education up massively.

I used this when I was a kid; I loved the penguin game!